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A creek so narrow you barely got your feet wet split a village for in excess of four decades worth of time. By an accident of geography, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by pine forests, meadows and spectacular scenery, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to span Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a border that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a partition. American soldiers nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

A few months after their own division was torn down, and prior to their state had unified again in 1990, a group of residents started memorialising their history. The project is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th annual anniversary of the demolition of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was officially launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition was not entirely finished. Speaking to the locals who endured the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an inhuman separation, which ripped relatives apart and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

“You were observers of an inhuman separation, which tore relatives asunder and turned neighbours into strangers.”

Bygone Background

Starting at its establishment in 1810, the village straddled the Royal Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family best known for giving all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier informed the gathering, the oddity did not stand in the way of the inhabitants drinking in the identical inn, going to the identical religious building and sending their kids to the same educational institution.

Following WWII Separation

Then came the second world war. Immediately after they appeared, the Russians put up timber poles by the creek. For a annual period they took over the complete hamlet, creating their control center in a house on the western side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The US forces persuaded them to pull back back over the brook. For a while, locals could still hop over, though as restrictions became stricter they were forced to show ID, although all knew who they were, and to go back at night.

Escalation of Frontier Restrictions

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was built, with landmines, tank traps and watchtowers. The locals could still see each other by scaling elevations, but on the Soviet side waving and calling out were prohibited. A local woman was added to a Stasi monitoring list for answering “back at you” to a Bavarian local who said her “happy new year”.

Heritage Site Development

I heard stories including these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a significant portion of his occupational time building it. Villagers were polled in the initial phases about how what length of wall they desired to maintain. They chose a portion on the west edge, near where one of their own succeeded to flee in the darkest hours with a scaling tool, subsequently the frontier was heavily reinforced.

Maintained Installations

Two guard towers are conserved alongside a series of exhibits illustrating the most significant events in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we move, Robert Lebegern enumerates the regulations: nobody could get closer than 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers needed special permission to care for their crops; the husband or wife could use the combine harvester but under no circumstances both, for fear that they sought to flee. Military personnel stood watch.

Broader Perspective

The boundary between West Germany and the GDR stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic coast in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and documented the greatest, but more than two times more persons (well over 300) lost their lives seeking to traverse it in provincial zones than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Hamlet Existence

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s locals were farmers or artisans, who accommodated to dwelling in the ambiguous area between two belief systems by avoiding attention and looking after their farms. They nor did they supported the socialist government nor fought it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Tourism

For sightseers, however, the hamlet became a type of pilgrimage. Roughly fifteen thousand came to visit every year, viewing tools in possession, to stare – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

25 years after unification, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a imaginary village resembling Mödlareuth, caused fresh interest.

Modern Changes

The opening of the new museum – with a cafe, store, film screening area and sizable vehicle area – is likely to